White House Letter; Shrinking From View But Still Looming Large

By ELISABETH BUMILLER

Published: November 26, 2001

Now comes the strange case of Dick Cheney, the phantom vice president. Did he spend his Thanksgiving in his ''secure and undisclosed location'' or in the sleekly redecorated Naval Observatory, the vice president's official residence that has taken on the characteristics of an armed camp?

His staff did not want to say. But one thing is certain: In a nation where vice presidents have always complained about being invisible, Mr. Cheney really is.

And yet, he has turned his disappearing act on its head. The more invisible he becomes, the more powerful he seems.

In the days after Sept. 11, Mr. Cheney and President Bush sat down and worked out a deadly serious arrangement: to ensure that one of them would be available to lead if the other was killed in a terrorist attack, they had a responsibility to separate themselves.

''There are some times when the vice president and I will be together and some times we won't be,'' Mr. Bush said soberly at a news conference last month. ''We take very seriously the notion of the continuity of government.''

The result has been one of the oddest vice presidencies on record.

Whenever the president is at the White House, Mr. Cheney is usually not. His advisers estimate that he spends close to 80 percent of his time at his secure location, where he conducts meetings with his staff by videoconference. He participates by videophone in the daily national security meeting held in the White House situation room with the president, the secretary of defense, the secretary of state and Condoleezza Rice, the national security adviser. He often stays overnight at his secure location, as does his wife, Lynne, and one of his senior advisers, Mary Matalin. And he talks all the time, his staff says, to the president.

But when Mr. Bush leaves town, the phantom emerges -- freed to do amusing things like browbeating House Republicans to stay in line.

Representatives James T. Walsh and John E. Sweeney, both upstate New York Republicans on the Appropriations Committee, were summoned to Mr. Cheney's office in the West Wing as President Bush was on his way out of town on Nov. 13 for his meetings with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia at the Bush ranch in Crawford, Tex.

''I hadn't seen much of him at all,'' Mr. Walsh said yesterday, recalling the meeting with the vice president. ''I kind of joked afterward to Sweeney that he really does exist.''

Mr. Cheney, perhaps invigorated to be out in the White House light, played his role as the president's Capitol Hill enforcer that day with élan. He calmly threatened a presidential veto if Mr. Walsh and Mr. Sweeney pressed for more money for New York beyond that in the $40 billion package that Mr. Bush wants for all disaster relief and homeland security this fiscal year.

''He was the president's guy that day,'' Mr. Walsh said.

Mr. Cheney is in fact the president's guy about town whenever he is let out of his cave -- the undisclosed location imagined by a ''Saturday Night Live'' skit that Mr. Cheney himself now uses as a punch line in speeches.

''It's good to see anybody in person these days,'' the vice president said in remarks to the Federalist Society in Washington while the president was in Texas. ''Lynne and I don't get too many visitors at the cave.''

During that same furlough, Mr. Cheney made a speech at the United States Chamber of Commerce, gave interviews to the British Broadcasting Company and ''60 Minutes II'' and stopped by the White House Coalition Information Center war room in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building.

On the weekend in mid-November that Mr. Bush was at the United Nations in New York, Mr. Cheney went to a Saturday night black-tie ball in Washington celebrating the Marine Corps' 226th birthday and then spoke at a Veterans Day service at Arlington National Cemetery.

The vice president's ''undisclosed location'' has also extended to a preserve near Pierre, S.D., where Mr. Cheney tracked down pheasant on a long-standing hunting date with friends earlier this month. Last month the vice president spent a weekend shooting ducks at Poughkeepsie, N.Y.

Only rarely has he been side by side with Mr. Bush. They were in the Oval Office together on the afternoon of Oct. 11, when the president welcomed him back from his secure location and announced at a news conference that evening that Mr. Cheney was ''looking swell.'' Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney were also together on Oct. 26, when the president signed an antiterrorism bill at the White House.

But friends and advisers say the relationship between the two men is as crucial as ever, and still refer to Mr. Cheney as the president's consigliere, or the coach to Mr. Bush's quarterback. Clearly the situation doesn't trouble Mr. Bush, who on the Monday before Thanksgiving pardoned not one but two turkeys, one at the White House and another, an alternate, that was not.

That turkey, the president announced, was ''in a secure and undisclosed location.''